Not being a marketeer or PR guru I’ve been struggling to get JASPA‘s raison d’être across succinctly enough. The elevator pitch is easy; give me a 100 words and your attention and I’ll get the message across. Give me 10 words and I’m useless. Continue reading…
Category Archives: General
Model, View, Control Freak – Part 2
Confessions of a control freak and an anecdote about AMF
If you haven’t read part 1, it’s there for the reading, and puts this post in context.
I figure the best place to start is where the title of this series comes from: I am a control freak; in life and so in code. This is not a very positive thing to say, but in terms of my personal skills development I feel it’s important. I don’t like things that just work; I have to know why.
There is a button on my washing machine that says “anti-crease“. This bugs the hell out of me: When would I not want this setting on? What’s the trade-off? If it creases my clothes less, then what is not doing? Is it cleaning them less?
Model, View, Control Freak – Part 1
Introduction
I’ve been having an argument with myself for years over my reluctance to use third party code in my work. I am referring to everything from simple JavaScript libraries to complete CMS platforms. I’m not saying I never use third party code, but I use a hell of a lot less than most people. This makes me arrogant, blinkered and quite possibly a dinosaur – or – perhaps it makes me experienced, focussed and a veteran.
On any given day I may be feeling guilty about my attitude; or smug and satisfied. Yesterday I was cursing the [generally wonderful] Smarty template engine, and feeling smug that my favouritism toward my own code was righteous. The day before I was interviewing a chap about a possible Drupal gig and was feeling guilty that I had so far ignored Drupal, to my detriment. Continue reading…
Eulogy
Or, “why I haven’t done any Flash work for a year”
I effectively gave up Flash when I came to Public and it’s now a whole year since I did any significant Flash work. In this short time AS3 has really come of age, there are tonnes of serious libraries, from fractals to physics, and PaperVision 3D seems almost omnipresent. The prospect of going back to the ActionScript freelance circuit after a year on the wagon would be quite daunting. Continue reading…
The law of leaky abstractions
I’m suspicious of people who don’t enable commenting on their blog – that just makes it a book. But this gripe aside, I like what Joel Spolsky has to say about abstraction in modern programming. Well, it pushes one of my buttons; perhaps “like” has nothing to do with it.
Sadly the people I feel need to appreciate his point the most probably won’t get past the second paragraph. That point, or at least the one I took away from it, is best summarized by this quote:
“[…] as we have higher and higher level programming tools with better and better abstractions, becoming a proficient programmer is getting harder and harder.”
I am eating a sandwich
I’ve been forcing myself to Twitter this week. That’s Twitter as verb and a proper noun of course. I say force, because frankly the first time I tried it I didn’t really see the point. But I figured 3 million people can’t be wrong, so I’ve agreed to not only give it some more time, but try and use it properly. Yes, that’s right I was clearly using it wrongly – at least that’s what I’m told by more avid twits than myself, and actually it’s this that interests me most – the idea that you can use a site wrongly. Continue reading…
A response to jQuery
JavaScript language abstraction
I just read this blog article by John Resig, the author of jQuery. The article in general is a criticism of various projects like my very own “JASPA” – A criticism of frameworks that attempt to bring JavaScript into the 21st century by abstracting it into a different language. Continue reading…
IE native functions “bug”?
In my article about method closures I showed a way to neatly create a portable reference to an object method that doesn’t ‘forget’ the object it belongs to. I have since discovered an aggravating problem on – you’ll never guess – Internet Explorer!
JASPA WIKI is launched
I’ve set up a wiki on jaspa.org.uk
I’ve been trying to find the time to sort out the official site for this project, and a wiki seems like a good format for organizing all the fragmented information that until now I’ve been posting on this blog. The wiki is likely to be the primary source of information and documentation on the JASPA project.
Check it out: » jaspa.org.uk/wiki/JASPA
JASPA example source code
I’ve put together a repository of JASPA source code examples on jaspa.org.uk.
At jaspa.org.uk/examples you can view interactive examples and full, highlighted source code. These examples are going to grow, particularly those in the jaspa.dom package, as this is heavily under construction. When an API feature is enabled an example will be added to this repository to serve as both a reference and a test case.